North Star Computers Inc. has announced the new North Star Horizon computer which uses a full speed (4 Mhz.) Z80 microprocessor and includes 16 KB of memory, a disk controller with one or two Shugart minifloppy disk drives and full extended disk basic. A serial I/O port is also provided.

Options include additional disk drives, hardware floating point arithmetic board, 24 lines by 80 character upper and lower case video display controller board, and 16 KB memory board with parity check. The video display board, when used in conjunction with the 16 KB memory board will display high resolution (480 by 250 points) graphics on a video monitor. The Horizon computer uses the Altair S-100 bus.

The single drive is $1599 in kit form and $1899 assembled. The dual drive is $1999 in kit form and $2349 assembled.

In fact, Horizon computers started to be sold several months before this press release was printed. At the time, North Star argued that the Horizon was the fist 'personal computer' that could load or save a 10 Kb disk program in less than 2 seconds.

The Horizon was one of the first business computers that was successfully introduced into small and medium size companies thanks to its robust construction and its efficient and easy-to-use software package.

The first issue of the Horizon newsletter is dated August 1977. It was then periodically mailed to all North Star product users and offered new products advertising, hardware and software updates, communication and software exchanges between users.